Great thing about animated films, and cinema in general, is that you will take from it whatever it tells you, personally. We each experience a film our own way and our interpretations and feelings towards it are inevitably influenced by our lives at the moment of watching.
Encanto to me is about the young-adult period of your life where everyone around you seems to have found their calling - some seem to have always known it even. A plan laid out out and a sense of purpose. Encanto deconstructs that idea by making the character with no gift its heroine, and by diving into the insecurities, the burdens and pressures of the characters who do have gifts. They have been reduced to their abilities or feel like they must never fail or complain, when really they just want to relax and be creative. That’s a powerful message - that it doesn’t matter whether you have a gift or not, your worth comes from who you are as a human being and your relationship with others.
I have to say, besides the colours, I found the animation pretty boring and alike a lot of Disney stuff we’ve seen for the past 10 years - it’s time for a change! The music was fun, the cultural and historical nods were great.
Solid effort by Disney!
I appreciate this film’s effort to tell such a famous story from an unexpected perspective. As a casual tennis fan and huge Williams sisters admirer, I knew little about the role Richard Williams played in their success.
By choosing to centre Richard, as much as it somewhat takes away from Venus and Serena’s much deserved and hard-earned protagonism, it does offer something different from your expected biopic. This raised really interesting questions about fatherhood and young stardom, spending a relatively big portion of the film around the debate of whether Venus should play junior tournaments - as much as Richard planned his children’s whole life for them and worked them so hard a neighbour even had to call the cops on him, here he chooses an unexpected stance by prioritising their childhood and education above entering big level competitions so early on. Therefore, I feel like this is a pretty balanced portrayal of Richard, giving credit where credit is due when it comes to his unwavering belief in his children, his unconditional love for them and vision, but also using other characters like Oracene or the coaches to call him out on his more eccentric behaviours and whenever his ego starts to get the best of him. The final speech with Venus in the lockerroom leads you by the hand to reach the conclusion that he was essentially a good father, but the movie still leaves considerable space for you to make your own judgements and to spark debate on how to raise a prodigy child (or even more complicated- two!). By knowing how Venus and Serena turned out in the end, we also are more prone to siding with Richard, because however him and Oracene raised their children, it looks like it worked because the Williams sisters have had a remarkable journey, whilst remaining humble and giving back.
As much as the screenplay’s highs and lows follow the standard for a big Hollywood movie; as much as there’s not much nuance surrounding the issue of race (with some scenes being forced into the narrative for emphasis, but not quite fitting in); as much as there’s some loose threads that are common with biopics that have to deal with real (messy) lives and real (messy) people and try to force them into a pretty little organised Hollywood picture; this movie still has a lot working in its favour, namely the choice of subject matter, Will Smith’s performance and the excitement that always accompanies sports-related films.
This film to me is more of an exercise on the ethical limits of documentary filmmaking than anything else.
Is it a fantastic, piercing, impactful piece of cinema? Absolutely.
Is it technically original and attempts to bring something new (or at least less overly done) to the table? Also true.
What is its message? One gets the sense that it is criticising its subject matter, mostly because it takes the perspective of the cow. But in reality, its objective observational style of filmmaking is mostly non-dogmatic, and each will take from it what best aligns with what they already mostly believed in before watching it. That is - animals lovers will think the film uncovers the dairy industry’s horrors; radical animal rights activists will revolt at the filmmaker’s inertia and lack of intervention to save the cow it follows; spectators which are neutral to the cause will mostly assume a “it is what it is” stance; and of course, anti-vegans won’t see anything wrong with what is shown (after all, look -they’re even letting the cows roam free for a little bit!).
If you’re a film fan or scholar you can have any of the above opinions on the subject matter, but you will also leave Cow with additional intelectual contemplation on what exactly the role of a documentarian is supposed to be. Is it okay for the director not to intervene for the sake of objective/neutral filmmaking or is it exploitive and self-serving to :asterisk_symbol:spoiler:asterisk_symbol: just stand by and do nothing as you watch a cow get shot in the head in the name of art?
This review may contain spoilers.
Bullet point review cus there’s too much nonsense in this film to even attempt at making a coherent text:
Huge shoutout to Carloto Cotta for building a career on the shoulders of his uncanny resemblance to Cristiano Ronaldo (Diamantino and the Netflix show Elite are arguably his two most famous roles and they’re both Cristiano spoofs that somehow simultaneously nail the absurdity of the footballer’s public image and completely misrepresent and mock who he is as a man). Would absolutely love for the two of them to meet one day, or god forbid, for Cotta to play Cristiano in an actually serious and non-offensive biopic where he could go further than the airhead façade.
Hated the characters of the sisters, they were excessively disgusting and abusive and their scenes made me uncomfortable.
THAT MANUELA MOURA GUEDES SCENE BELONGS IN A MUSEUM. SO. GOOD. my favorite bit in the movie. I cried laughing.
Hated what they did to the queer relationship between Lucia and Aisha. Highkey homophobic.
The political subplot was a bit cringe. I wish it had been less in your face, but still pretty self-aware.
The Portuguese hit show Por do Sol which has been the most unanimously loved portuguese television production since Morangos com Açucar or Aqui não há quem viva shares a lot of the same humor of Diamantino, just with better actors and a little bit more depth. But what is great about both is the Portuguese’s unmatched ability to make fun of themselves and to so completely and thoroughly understand the absurdity of our cultural landmarks (soaps, football, our crusader and colonial past, and the catholic church). I think we’re one of, if not the funniest people on Earth.
